Market power and food loss at the producer-retailer interface of fruit and vegetable supply chains in Germany

Food loss and waste are associated with an unnecessary consumption of natural resources and avoidable greenhouse gas emissions. The United Nations have thus set the reduction of food loss and waste on the political agenda by means of the Sustainable Development Goal Target 12.3. The German Federal Government committed itself to this goal by implementing the National Strategy for Food Waste Reduction in 2019. However, this policy approach relies heavily on voluntary action by involved actors and neglects the possible role of power imbalances along the food supply chain. While current research on food loss and waste in industrialised countries predominantly focuses on the consumer level, this study puts emphasis on the under-researched early stages of the food supply chain from the field to retailers’ warehouses. Based on 22 expert interviews with producers, producer organisations and retailers, this article identifies major inter-stage drivers of food loss in the supply chains for fresh fruit and vegetables in Germany. Its main novelty is to demonstrate how market power imbalances and risk shifting between powerful and subordinate actors can reinforce the tendency of food loss on the part of producers further up the supply chain. Results indicate that prevalent institutional settings, such as contractual terms and conditions, trading practices, ordering processes, product specifications, and communication privilege retailers and encourage food loss. The mechanisms in which these imbalances manifest, go beyond the European Commission’s current legislation on Unfair Trading Practices. This study suggests a research agenda that might help to formulate adjusted policy instruments for re-structuring the German fruit and vegetable markets so that less food is wasted.

Volition and “free will”

Philosophers have debated the “free will” for centuries, yet it is only in recent years that voluntary actions have become an object of investigation for cognitive neuroscience. This review begins by attempting a definition of volition (i.e., the mental state associated specifically with voluntary actions) that could be relevant for cognitive neuroscience. We then review the neuropsychology of volition. Alterations in voluntary behaviour in neurological and psychiatric patients first suggested the possibility that specific cognitive processes of volition have specific bases in the brain. These findings counter traditional dogmas that human volition is somehow ineffable, and instead suggest that voluntary actions depend on specific brain circuitry that is accessible to scientific investigation.The second part of the review focuses on the experimental psychology of volition. A number of studies have combined a systematic manipulation of experimental conditions, and recording of brain processes associated with voluntary action. We argue that this combination is most likely to identify the brain processes specifically associated with volition, and we therefore review these studies systematically. For example, several studies link the Readiness Potential of the EEG to preparatory conscious preplanning of actions. Further, a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies (PET/ fMRI) reveals a distinctive pattern of activations for choosing one among many possible actions - a key element of volition. The medial frontal cortex appears to make a key contribution to both these biomarkers of volition.

A Comparative Look at Social Housing in Developed and Developing Countries

Provision of housing is vital to all the members of any country, and even a fundamental right of every person in a society to be housed properly. While the state has a primary role to play in reallocation of resources to meet the needs of the majority and ensure ‘public good', the economic status of developing nations has made this a complex issue. The developing world has increasingly come to rely on voluntary action, especially the social enterprise movements. There are marked differences in the approaches to tackling the social housing issue in the developed and developing world, from the point of view of the role played by social enterprises in this area. This chapter takes a comparative look at the role played by social entrepreneurs and social enterprises in the area of social housing in the developing and developed world by looking at some specific examples and case studies and concludes that in the developing world the social enterprise movement has a stronger role to play.

Mesoscale cortex-wide neural dynamics predict self-initiated actions in mice several seconds prior to movement

Volition - the sense of control or agency over one's voluntary actions - is widely recognized as the basis of both human subjective experience and natural behavior in non-human animals. To date, several human studies have found peaks in neural activity preceding voluntary actions, e.g. the readiness potential (RP), and some have shown upcoming actions could be decoded even before awareness. These findings remain controversial with some suggesting they pose a challenge to traditional accounts of human volition while others proposing that random processes underlie pre-movement neural activity. Here we seek to address part of this controversy by evaluating whether pre-movement neural activity in mice contains structure beyond that expected from random processes. Implementing a self-initiated water-rewarded lever pull paradigm in mice while recording widefield [Ca++] neural activity we find that cortical activity changes in variance seconds prior to movement and that upcoming lever pulls or spontaneous body movements could be predicted between 1 second to more than 10 seconds prior to movement, similar to but even earlier than in human studies. We show that mice, like humans, are biased towards initiation of voluntary actions during specific phases of neural activity oscillations but that the pre-movement neural code in mice changes over time and is widely distributed as behavior prediction improved when using all vs single cortical areas. These findings support the presence of structured multi-second neural dynamics preceding voluntary action beyond that expected from random processes. Our results also suggest that neural mechanisms underlying self-initiated voluntary action could be preserved between mice and humans.